Friday, October 24, 2003

Foxy Fox

The Fox network has launched Skin, a soap opera about the porno industry in Los Angeles. As Marge Simpson once commented, in an episode set in the year 2010:

You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice. Yeesh!

Speaking of Fox and their "news" channel, check out this article about an artist who has created a Media Deconstruction Kit:

The kit as designed by Packer and Smith uses Max/MSP and Jitter graphical programming environments to create an interactive interface for real-time media manipulation. Broadcast signals are fed into the kit, which Packer and Smith distort, change, and otherwise tweak into an output that often reads and sounds like usual news presentation but which has been altered into something markedly different. Talking heads presiding over news crawls become pixellated blurry abstractions. Press-conference footage is cut up and rearranged on-screen. Sound and dialog are stuttered and out of sync, or overlapped to become as disorienting as a Robert Altman movie.

Insert trenchant and concluding punditry here.